Authentic gnosis is inseparable from a charisma, an illumination by grace which transforms our intelligence. And since the object of contemplation is a personal existence and presence, true gnosis implies encounter, reciprocity, faith as a personal adherence to the personal presence of God Who reveals Himself.
In the strict sense, among the ascetics of the Christian East gnosis constitutes the peak of the life of prayer—a peak where gnosis is given by God to man "who knows himself fallible," says Evagrius, and transforms his indigence in an unfolding of faith. We know Evagrius's formula, which has become an adage: "The one who has purity in prayer is true theologian, and the one who is true theologian has purity in prayer."
But purity in prayer implies the state of silence. The hesychasts are the "silents": encounter and gift, gnosis is placed beyond the νους; it demands the surmounting and arrest of thought.
Accordingly, this notion of silent gnosis as true theology does not directly correspond to theological teaching, to a theology which can and must be expressed through language. The direct foundation of theological teaching is the Incarnation of the Word—just as it is for iconography. Since the Word has incarnated Himself, the Word can be thought and taught—and in the same way the Word can be painted.
But the Incarnation of the Word has no other goal than to lead as to the Father, in the Spirit. Theology as word and as thought must necessarily conceal a gnostic dimension, in the sense of the theology of contemplation and silence. It is a matter of opening our thought to a reality which goes beyond it. It is is matter of a new mode of thought where thought does not include, does not seize, but finds itself included and seized, mortified and vivified by contemplative faith. So theological teaching locates itself with difficulty between gnosis—charisma and silence, contemplative and existential knowledge—and episteme—science and reasoning.
Theological language uses episteme, but cannot reduce itself to it without falling yet again from this world. It must set the spirit on the path to contemplation, to pure prayer where thought stops, to the ineffable.
Indispensable to the thinking, conscientious Christian, theological teaching constitutes at once a necessity and a hindrance. Gnosis as contemplation is an exit to the state of a future age, a vision of what is beyond history, of what completes history, a projection of eschatology into the instant. Gnosis is eschatological—an unfolding of this silence which, said St. Isaac the Syrian, constitutes the language of the world which is coming.
Theological teaching, on the contrary, is made for historical work here below. It must be adopted to space and time, to environments and points in time. It must never, for all that, forget contemplation; it must fertilize itself from instants of eschatological silence and attempt to express, or at least to suggest, the ineffable. Nourished with contemplation, it does not become established in silence but seeks to speak the silence, humbly, by a new use of thought and word.
That is why theology must be praise and must dispose us to praise God. A St. Gregory of Nazianzus, a St. Simeon the New Theologian, both of whom have merited the name "Theologian," have expressed themselves with an inspired poetry. St. Jobs of Damascus is the author of magnificent hymns that we still sing: with him theology becomes liturgical praise. Even his most scholastic statements give site to poetic flights.
Yet theological thought can also become a hindrance, and one must avoid indulging in it, abandoning oneself to the feverish illusion of concepts. Diadochus of Photice (chaps. 67 and 68) reminds us that the intellect, until it has achieved pure prayer, finds itself confined, ill at ease, and as it were, contracted by prayer: then it prefers theological thought which allows it to "dilate" itself. But one must not forget that there is a prayer which surpasses this "dilation"—the state of those who, in all intimacy, are filled with divine grace.
Theological thought must dispose to praise and express contemplation. One must avoid it becoming a flight before the necessary "contraction" of prayer, to replace the mystery hued in silence with mental schemata easily handled, certainly, and whose use can intoxicate, but which are ultimately empty.
How, then, are we to locate taught theology with a certain fairness between the "unutterable words" heard by St. Paul in the "third heaven" (the one which goes beyond the opposition of the sensible heaven and the intelligible heaven and represents the Divine Itself, the Untreated) and simple episteme, the constant temptation of the theologian? The right term could well be sophia, wisdom. Certainly, wisdom is a divine name. But one must take the word in its primitive sense which, in ancient Greece, indicated a certain human quality, mostly a skill, but the inspired skill of the craftsman and the artist. With Homer, sophia, the εντεχνος σοφια of the ancient Greeks, qualified the skill of the craftsman, of the artist, of the poet. The Septuagint has translated by Sophia the Hebrew expression which designates Divine Wisdom as God's perfect technique in His work. This sense unites with that of economy, of a certain prudence: phronesis and sophia are here very close.
Theology as sophia is connected at once to gnosis and to episteme. It reasons, but seeks always to go beyond concepts. Here a necessary moment of the failure of human thought breaks in before the mystery that it wants to make knowable. A theology that constitutes itself into a system is always dangerous. It imprisons in the enclosed sphere of thought the reality to which it must open thought.
In St. Paul, knowledge of God writes itself into a personal relationship expressed in terms of reciprocity: reciprocity with the object of theology (which, in reality, is a subject), reciprocity also with those to whom the theological word is addressed. At its best, it is communion: I know as I am known. Before the development of Christian theology, this mystery of communion appears absent from Greek thought: it is found only in Philo, that is to say, in a partially biblical context. Theology, then, is located in a relationship of revelation where the initiative belongs to God, while implying a human response, the free response of faith and love, which the theologians of the Reformation have often forgotten. The involvement of God calls forth our involvement. The theological quest supposes therefore the prior coming of what is quested, or rather of Him Who has already come to us and is present in us: God was the first to love us and He sent us His Son, as St. John says. This coming and this presence are seized by faith which thus underlies, with priority and in all necessity, theological thought. Certainly, faith is present in all walks, in all sciences of the human spirit, but as supposition, as working hypothesis: here, the moment of faith remains burdened with an uncertainty which proof alone could clear. Christian faith, on the contrary, is adherence to a presence which confers certitude, in such a way that certitude, here, is first. "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the manifestation of realities unseen" (Heb. 11:1) . What one quests is already present, precedes us, makes possible our questing itself. "Through faith, we comprehend (we think) how the ages have been produced" (Heb. 11:3). Thus faith allows us to think, it gives us true intelligence. Knowledge is given to us by faith, that is to say, by our participatory adherence to the presence of Him Who reveals Himself. Faith is therefore not a psychological attitude, a mere fidelity. It is an ontological relationship between man and God, an internally objective relationship for which the catechumen prepares himself, and through which baptism and chrismation are conferred upon the faithful: gifts which restore and vivify the deepest nature of man. "In baptism," said Irenaeus, "one receives the immutable canon of truth." It is first the "rule of faith," transmitted to the initiated. But this regula fidei (Tertullian, Irenaeus) implies the very faculty of receiving it. "The heretics who have perverted the rule of truth," St. Irenaeus wrote, "preach themselves when they believe that they are preaching Christianity (Adversus haereses, Book III). This faculty is the personal existence of man, it is his nature made to assimilate itself to divine life—both mortified in their state of separation and death and vivified by the presence of the Holy Spirit. Faith as ontological participation included in a personal meeting is therefore the first condition for theological knowledge.
Vladimir Lossky, Orthodox Theology: An Introduction (1978) p. 13-17